The argument

Social security – defined to include social assistance (America’s ‘welfare’) – is the great facilitator: it enables economic and social progress to be achieved, demographic and individual change to occur.

It protects the incomes and rights of individuals who suffer the consequences of the economic and social change that benefits the community as a whole. By minimising personal distress, it prevents the social unrest that might otherwise inhibit economic and social advance.

Social security provides individuals with the time and resources to adjust to new circumstances, to rebuild their lives after personal catastrophe and misfortune. It enables them to plan and to save for the future, to create personal security and financial independence.

Social security binds society together through a system of mutual obligation and sharing. By ensuring that the extremes of poverty and wealth are avoided, it fosters the personal independence and interdependence that underpins democracy. By risk-pooling and sharing, society confers individual security.

Britain led the world with the post-war Beveridge reforms: comprehensive social security (National Insurance), universal social assistance (National Assistance). Society’s safety net remains very effective by international standards, although social insurance benefits are comparatively low (Eardley, 1996). Britain is still a world leader in the provision of occupational and second tier pensions and in integrated Welfare to Work programmes.

Social security is not just a mechanism, it is a goal for society and each of its citizens. Social security helps to define and underpin individual well-being and social justice.

Social security is weakened when the sense of shared interest is lost or loosened. This happens when social security is restricted to the few and used by a minority. Focusing on the cost of social security in isolation from either its purpose or achievements can have the same socially disintegrative effect.

Rejection of the system can result in the rejection of those who are intended to be its immediate beneficiaries. Claimants, who are despised, may come to despise themselves – and to reject those who first despised them.

Most benefit recipients who are castigated for being passive and dependent on the state are unfairly criticised. Almost all claimants of working age have aspirations of independence but lack the wherewithal to achieve them (Shaw, 1996; Trickey et al, 1998). Pensioners are justly receiving the rewards for their past contributions as workers and taxpayers; very few have willingly squandered their wealth to live at society’s expense.